No -- again, I'm not judging the original users of such terms, but the fact
that they became the norm so that instead of using the very common term
"tree" to describe IMS (it might not exactly be a tree, but wlog we can
consider it such), we perpetuate the relational folks' terminology not just
for relational theory, but for products that are not in their camp. From a
global standpoint, that is a common marketing strategy -- classify
competitor products and your own and then attact the super-classes. It has
worked so well for the relational database industry in grabbing mindshare
that almost every product, including PICK, has called itself a relational
database. It makes sense for Oracle and other RDBMS vendors to use this
trick, but perhaps the textbooks could be a little less slanted in their use
of terms.

For example, if you say that there are hierarchical databases and then list
IMS and PICK (I know it is never listed, except as "and others") in that
category, you would have readers thinking that there is anything similar
between IMS and PICK (nothing I can see other than the ability to display
the structure of each as a di-graph).

I'm rambling and this isn't an important enough point. But if you DO KNOW
of any reason to believe that prior to Codd's publications in 1970 (or his
work to get there) any of the existing database implementations classified
themselves as hierarchical or network, please point me to the sources. I'm
VERY interested in that. Thanks. --dawn
Received on Mon Apr 19 2004 - 19:54:51 CEST